Every time an athlete tweets his way into trouble, the reporter in me snickers.

In the days before Twitter — for those who aren’t students of ancient history, that would be 2006 — an athlete such as Miami Dolphins safety Don Jones might have made a derogatory remark about the St. Louis Rams drafting openly gay Michael Sam to a reporter and merely denied it if it showed up in print.

Maybe Jones would have responded to the storm of criticism that followed with the tried-and-true “It was taken out context.” Or he might have taken the easy road and stamped the reporter as a liar by offering up, “I was misquoted.”

In those days, only two people in the world knew what really happened, and the rest of us couldn’t be sure. If that were the case here, Jones would wriggle off the hook. The reporter would just be collateral damage.

But Jones tweeted his comments after a camera caught Sam celebrating by kissing his male partner — “OMG” and “Horrible” — and there was no one else to blame. The tweets were quickly taken down, but after five minutes on the Internet, everybody this side of Beijing already knew. There is nothing for Jones to do but apologize and take his punishment.

Famous and not-so-famous athletes make Twitter missteps every day, some of which are offensive and many of which are merely embarrassing. I did a quick Internet search and came up with lengthy lists of athletes’ gaffes, many of which included Ohio State third-team quarterback Cardale Jones’ thoughtless remark about classes being “pointless” in October 2012.

Jones might have just been having a bad day with a professor — even James Thurber had a few of those at Ohio State — but once you blurt something out on Twitter, it doesn’t go away, and there’s no one else to blame. All it cost him was a one-game suspension and his tweeting privileges, small potatoes in Twitter infamy.

Running back Larry Johnson was suspended and eventually released by the Kansas City Chiefs after using an anti-gay slur, cracks on his coach and insults to a fan on Twitter in October 2009, less than 100 yards shy of becoming the Chiefs’ career rushing leader.

Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall lost a two-year endorsement deal with Champion for controversial tweets about the death of Osama bin Laden. Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas’ tweets called attention to a guns-in-the-locker room fiasco that got him suspended, convicted, a 60-day sentence in a halfway house and, finally, traded. The list is endless.

It’s not just Twitter. Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was on CNN last night apologizing for racist remarks recorded by his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, that will likely result in his forced sale of the team.

It’s hard to say how or why Stiviano recorded his remarks, but another recording of Sterling surfaced on Radar Online last week of him explaining the remarks — jealousy. For all we know, somebody might have already made another recording of Sterling’s comments while watching the tape of last night’s interview.

Like Twitter, the smartphone has taken some heat off reporters. Everybody with a smartphone is equipped with a recorder and camera, so “off the record” pretty much means in a closet with the door shut.

Coaches have always expressed strong opinions at alumni events that remained private, and if reported, were usually attached with a qualifier. They were secondhand reports, and the guilty party could always hide behind “out of context” or “misquoted.”

Now, that’s not so easy. At every event, large or small, somebody in the room might be making an audio or video recording of it, and it can be all over the Internet before an offending party has left the building.

When it is your voice on the recording and your face on video, “misquoted” no longer applies. And most of us won’t get a chance to explain it away on CNN.